Google Panda: The Fallout Continues

Content sites are still facing the fallout from the Google Panda update.  The update has been rolled out in stages from February through May.  The update was initially meant to target so called “Content Farms” that were impacting the quality of the search results.  Google at the time had stated that the Panda update “impacts 11.8% of our queries” and is meant to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites” which they define as “low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.” The update was meant to “provide better rankings for high-quality sites” which they define as “sites with original content and information.” The update was first rolled out in the U.S. and subsequently rolled out internationally.

However, the impact may be broader based than initially thought and some high profile media sites may be inadvertently be caught in the Panda trap.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal has stated that “no algorithm is 100 percent accurate. Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent. That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is.”

Sites that have seen significant drops in organic traffic over the last 90 days may have been impacted by the Panda update.  As usual, Google won’t offer any definitive advice, instead offering a list of general suggestions for improving the value of your content (see: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

We have found some other recommendations from our own research and from various discussion forums that may be of help to combat Panda:

• Panda may be inadvertently hurting sites that syndicate their content or put out RSS feeds.  Our own research has found that Google may be having difficulty sorting out who the true source of a piece of content is, and is allowing syndication partners and even content scrappers which should have been removed by this algorithm, to rank highly for that piece of content.
• Low quality content may be hurting the entire domain.  Consider removing or using no index no follow on portions of your site that could be deemed lower quality by Google.
• Remove tag clouds or make them uncrawlable by search engines by using the no index Meta tag.  Matt Cutts, current head of Google’s Webspam team, has previously suggested that large tag clouds could be considered keyword stuffing.
• Consider implementing the Google Source attribution Meta tags to help Google determine that your site is the original source of the content.  Although not directly correlated to rankings in Google, this will help in Google news and might be a signal in the organic algorithm as well.
• Block search results pages from getting indexed.  Google doesn’t want their search results pages clogged with links to other search result pages on your site.
• Make sure you are using proper canonicalization of all of your URLs, especially the WWW vs. non WWW version of the pages.
• Clean up your back link profile, and work to acquire higher quality back links.

Although taking these steps won’t guarantee that you will see immediate traffic boosts from Google, you should working to continuously improve your site quality.  As always, you can discuss this further with your Account Director and SEO Strategist.